1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to content management and the media industry and, more particularly, enhanced systems, program product, and methods to manage media content.
2. Description of Related Art
The media industry is experiencing a profound business disruption due to the change from analog to digital business practices. This, for example, has led to a radical re-evaluation of current media management business processes, particularly in relation to the proliferation of channels, consumer devices, delivery mechanisms and rights management. Technology has moved from that of a serial scheduling of content on a single-medium, single channel, to one of multi-channel multi-media, and multi-platform. Also, content schedules, for example, are now not only the domain of the deliverer of content, but through consumer technology advances in such content schedules can be controlled by consumers.
Recently, digital content store systems and metadata store systems have been developed which allow some level of control over media content, e.g., song, documents, video. Some of these systems also associate metadata with labels unrelated to content and location of the content. Such systems, however, often provide control over content in media by key codes or authorization codes to allow access to only paid users or have a preselected time frame for expiration of rights or have expiration rights upon preselected number of uses.
Applicants have recognized that since the advent of digitization, the focus has been on storing and managing the newly digitized asset. Accordingly, little attention has been paid to the value of the content, especially fiscal, as businesses move to digital environments.
Additionally, Applicants recognized that developers often, as a matter of course, build a framework for the particular application they are developing, be this just coding standards, sample code, or common base classes to support their needs. What also often happens during such development is that these “frameworks” become tied to the product being developed and invariably cannot be re-used by new developments without significant rework to remove dependencies related to the product to which the framework is tied. This, however, may not be bad coding, but just that developers are often focused on the problems they need to solve related to the specific application and this can lead to ties being placed into the core code base.